On Wednesday 17th Feb, 2015, a group of hacktivists calling themselves “The oppressed defenders” conducted a cyber attack on Saudi Arabian based bank AlJazira in shape of a Distributed denial of service attack (DD0S).

As a result the online banking and e-service domains of bank AlJazira were forced to go offline for more than thirty minutes.

One of the hacker told HackRead the reason behind targeting this bank was human rights violations within the Kingdom.Hacker claimed they had warned the new Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz to stop violating human rights in the country or prepare yourself for never ending cyber attacks.In past few weeks the same group had attacked Saudi financial institutions such as Samba, Alahli and Riyad bank. “Those attacks on Samba, Alahli, Riyad bank were just small warnings to the Saudi regime and it’s king and if they don’t pay attention to the demands made by people, there will be attacks with more strength than before. These attacks are warnings to make Saudi regime change its behavior with the people and stops its wrong policies,” the hacker added.

Below are screenshots showing the bank’s site were down:

Identity of hackers remain unknown, but in an email HackRead was told there will be new and more powerful cyber attacks on Saudi financial institutions to put an end to violations of human rights in the Kingdom.

At the time of publishing this article, the Bank AlJazira was restored and available online.